Alpine inbox format error

[Trond Endrestøl]

On Wed, 7 May 2014 13:55-0700, Brian W. wrote:

> Does anyone know what causes the alpine error inbox not in valid format? A
> few times a year my wife gets this problem while I never do on my freebsd
> with postfix server.

I've seen mailbox corruption with imap-uw on i386 when the mailboxes 
reach a certain size. I'm not sure if the limit is higher on amd64.

The corruption occurs at the beginning of the mailbox, with the 
remaining messages being largely intact. You might need to perform 
some surgery with dd or some other tool to skip the corrupted section 
and extract the good messages to a new file.

This corruption might be due to a buffer/integer overflow somewhere in 
c-client.

The above is probably a good enough reason to migrate to the maildir 
format or at least trim your mailboxes regularly to avoid corruption.

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